This Night’s Foul Work

XXXIII

‘THE QUICK OF VIRGINS, SORTED BY THREE IN EQUAL QUANTITIES,’ SAID Adamsberg. ‘By three. We ought to take notice of that.’

‘It must be the dosage,’ said Mordent. ‘Three pinches of powdered saint’s bones, three pinches of the penile bone, three pinches of the wood of the cross, and three of some sort of virgin principle.’

‘No, commandant, I don’t think so. We’ve already had two virgins being dug up. Whatever they wanted to find there, it seems to me that one would have been quite enough to get three pinches. And it would have been enough to write “in equal quantities”. Instead of that the recipe says “by three”.’

‘Yes, three pinches.’

‘No, three virgins. Three pinches from three virgins.’

‘You don’t have to take it that far, surely. It’s both a recipe and a sort of poem.’

‘No,’ said Adamsberg, ‘Just because the language seems complicated to us, we don’t have to regard it as a poem. It’s an old cookbook, nothing else.’

‘That’s correct,’ said Danglard, although he was a bit shocked by the casual way Adamsberg referred to the De reliquis. ‘It is just a plain compendium of medical recipes. It’s not meant to be in code, it’s meant to be easily understood.’

‘Well, that’s just what it isn’t,’ said Justin.

‘It’s not all that obscure,’ said Adamsberg. ‘We just have to take care to read each word carefully, and not miss anything out. In these ghoulish mixtures, just like any cookery recipe, every word counts. “Sorted by three.” That’s the danger area. That’s where we have to start work.’

‘Where?’ asked Estalère.

‘With the third virgin.’

‘Yes, it’s quite possible,’ agreed Danglard.

‘We’ll have to go and look for her,’ said Adamsberg.

‘Yes?’ said Mercadet, lifting his head.

Lieutenant Mercadet was taking plentiful notes, as he did every time he was wide awake enough to compensate by redoubled zeal for his previous absences.

‘The first thing we need to do is check whether any other virgin from Upper Normandy has been recently killed, or has died in an apparent accident.’

‘How big do you reckon the saint’s zone of influence would be?’ asked Retancourt.

‘The best thing would be to draw up a radius of fifty kilometres around Le Mesnil-Beauchamp.’

‘Seven thousand, eight hundred and fifty square kilometres,’ said Mercadet, making a rapid calculation. ‘And how old would our victim be?’

‘Symbolically,’ said Danglard, ‘one could guess a minimal age of twenty-five. That was the age of Saint Catherine, when adult virginity is supposed to start. And we could use a cut-off date of forty, because after that both men and women were considered old.’

‘That’s a bit too broad,’ said Adamsberg. ‘We need to move more quickly. Let’s start with the age of our existing two victims, somewhere between thirty and forty. About how many women would that give us in the area, Mercadet?’

The lieutenant was given a few moments to do his calculations in silence, surrounded by his cups of coffee, sorted in threes. It was a pity, Adamsberg reflected, that Mercadet was so given to drowsiness. He had a remarkable head for figures and lists.

‘Very roughly, I’d say about a hundred and twenty to two hundred and fifty women in the area who might possibly be virgins.’

‘That’s still too many,’ said Adamsberg chewing his lip. ‘We need to make the area smaller. Let’s target an area of, say, twenty kilometres around Le Mesnil. What does that give?’

‘Between forty and eighty women,’ Mercadet replied promptly.

‘And how are we going to identify these forty virgins?’ asked Retancourt, sharply. ‘It’s not a crime, so it won’t show up on any database.’

A virgin, thought the commissaire, glancing quickly at his large but pretty lieutenant. Retancourt kept her private life very private, hermetically sealed against any inquiries. Perhaps this detailed discussion of virgin women was exasperating her.

‘We’ll consult the local priests,’ Adamsberg said. ‘Starting with the one in Le Mesnil. Work quickly, all of you. Overtime if necessary.’

‘Commissaire,’ said Gardon, ‘I don’t think it’s as urgent as all that. Pascaline and Elisabeth were killed three and a half months ago and four months ago respectively. The third virgin is almost certainly already dead.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Adamsberg, looking up at the ceiling. ‘Because of the new wine which has to be the final liquid binding the whole mixture. It has to mix all the ingredients. So it will be the November vintage.’

‘Or October,’ said Danglard. ‘They used to do the first pressing earlier than we do today.’

‘All right,’ said Mordent, ‘So what does that mean?’

‘Well, if we follow what Danglard told us,’ Adamsberg went on, ‘you have to respect the harmonious balance for the mixture to succeed. If I was making this mixture, I’d arrange for regular intervals between taking the ingredients so that there wasn’t too long a gap. Like a sort of relay race.’

‘It’s compulsory, even,’ said Danglard, chewing his pencil. ‘In medieval times irregularity and interruptions were a sort of obsession. They brought bad luck, broke the spell. Whatever the line was, a real or an abstract one, it shouldn’t be interrupted or broken. In all things, it was essential to follow an orderly and continuous development, in a straight line without hiccups.’

‘Now,’ said Adamsberg, ‘the killing of the cat and the looting of the relics happened three months before Pascaline’s death. Then the “quick of virgins” was taken three months after their deaths. Three, like the number of pinches, the number of virgins, three months, like the length of a season. So the last “quick” will be collected either three months before the new wine, or just before it. And the virgin will be killed three months before that.’

Adamsberg interrupted himself and counted on his fingers, several times.

‘So it’s quite probable that this woman is still alive, but that her death is programmed for some time in the next three months, most likely either early April or late June. And today’s the twenty-fifth of March.’

Three months, two weeks – or even one week. In silence, everyone was considering the urgency and the impossibility of their task. Because even if they did manage to establish a list of virgin women in the circle around Le Mesnil, how could they possibly guess which one the angel of death would choose? And how on earth could they protect her?

‘All this is just speculation on a massive scale,’ said Voisenet, shaking himself as if coming round at the end of a film and abruptly tearing himself away from the fiction that had engaged him up till then. ‘Like everything else.’

‘Yes, that’s all it is,’ said Adamsberg.

A flurry of wings between heaven and earth, thought Danglard anxiously.